Photo above is property of Ink & Clues
Company: Ink & Clues
Game: Secrets of the Holloway Manor
Country: Sweden 🇸🇪
Language: English
Type of Game: Digital Escape Game 💻
Genre: Mystery, Detective
Date Played: February 21, 2025
Difficulty (based on 2 players): 6/10
Size of Team: 1-4 ppl
Time: Approximately 1.5 Hours
Price: $13.00
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On September 16th, 2015, four teenagers set out to explore the eerie, long-abandoned Holloway Manor near their small town of Stonebrook. Rumors of ghostly apparitions and hidden secrets had surrounded the mansion for years, drawing the teens in. Inside, they uncover something far worse than they expected: a hidden chamber filled with the remains of multiple victims. Now, as the detective, it's your job to uncover the victims' identities and the dark history behind their fate. The truth lies within the walls of Holloway Manor and the quiet town of Stonebrook.
Photos above are property of Ink & Clues
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I would describe the Ink & Clues games as micro narrative mysteries. It's one of those games that is more a matter of making reasonable deductions/leaps to construct what actually happened from out an imaginative expansion of the story and its facts rather than a series of puzzles to solve. What it does well is to make a lot of intriguing intimations with a very economical amount of actual material to have to survey and keep in your head. The flipside of this is that it can feel quite thin at times, straining the plausibility of the entire plot, while making the leaps seem a step too far given what limited facts you have to reason from. It did a good job of playing by the rules of a well crafted mystery by giving every suspect a substantial motive and accordant evidence, but by the end,for all its mysterious intimations playing it felt a little empty, because the mystery itself lacked substantive deductive depth and layers.
Photos above are property of Ink & Clues
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Though It did a great job of alluding to some great mystery, the process of getting there was not sufficiently developed. It was constructed through the barest trappings of a realistic case file, and was more about speculating upon the mysterious narrative premise it did so well at intimating, then it was on unravelling some chain of evidence. The smoking gun itself, though clever - maybe too on the nose - was like hidden in plain sight. You knew that was the critical piece of evidence, and when you knew that the rest of the mystery collapsed down to earth, because whatever cool explanation these other suspects and narrative threads it may have had hidden inside itself, it was ultimately just a tool to erect scaffolding necessary to give the appearance of a deep mystery so as to keep you guessing. Which is to say all these threads didn't really matter in the end. This game has such a dichotomy of like great power of sucking you in but leaves you kind of high and dry in the actual playing of it.
Photos above are property of Ink & Clues
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Even for all this criticism I still had fun playing this case. It still gave me that warm fuzzy mystery game feeling of wonder, and I would do another one, but with the hope that they keep up the good narrative work while also adding a little more depth to the game itself. It's a bite sized mystery, that's half story, half a good think. I recommend it if your looking for something light and intriguing.
(If you do decide to try this experience, give us a shoutout or tag us on social media so we know you heard it from "ESCAPETHEROOMers"!)
Disclosure: We thank Ink & Clues for providing us with samples of the game. Although a complimentary experience was generously provided, it does not impact our opinion on the review whatsoever.
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